Halton Arp's intrinsic redshift observations
contradict the big bang's assumption that redshift is a measure of
distance (and thus of age; the higher the redshift, the farther
away from us and the closer to the beginning of the universe). Can
this contradiction be tested? Three clues should be obvious: if
redshift is distorting distance, then size, energy and distribution
will all be systematically out of proportion as well.

We covered one instance of energy distortion in the
Aug 20, 2004 TPOD, "How Big is a Gamma Ray Burst?" Arp showed that
high and low redshift objects are clustered together in family
groupings, so the errors introduced to the distance calculations
should be proportionally larger as the redshift becomes higher. So
the distortions should be greatest at the highest redshifts. In
other words, when reading mainstream astronomy, you would expect to
come across comments like: "gamma ray bursts in the early universe
were much stronger than more recent gamma ray bursts."

One observation of a nearby faint gamma ray burst
doesn't guarantee a distortion. It might actually BE a fainter
burst. But there is more. The distribution of galaxies is also
distorted by mistaking redshift for distance. This results in an
odd-looking universe where streams of galaxies appear to point at
the Earth from every direction. We covered this type of distortion
in the Oct 18th TPOD "Fingers of God".

The third type of distortion that should appear by
believing that galaxies and galaxy groups are farther away than they
actually are is a distortion of size. The above image juxtaposes two
galaxies at the sizes they would be if they are at their
conventional redshift distances. The low-redshift M81 (inset) is one
of the largest nearby spiral galaxies. The higher-redshift NGC 309
(large image), an otherwise normal-appearing spiral, has been
distorted so much by assuming that it's at its redshift distance
that it appears to swallow M81 in one of its arms.

Like Ptolemy's
epicycles, these distortions disappear when we refocus our vision to
accept the way these galaxies are distributed as the more accurate
measure of distance, and reject the "first guess" hypothesis that
redshift equals distance that has dominated astronomy for 80 years.